Twitter: "We are committed to working every single day at solving this problem."

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Top officials from Facebook, Google, and Twitter told a congressional panel Tuesday that their platforms hosted a disinformation campaign carried out over their networks by Russian state actors. The propaganda centered on the presidential election, immigration, gun rights, gay rights, and racial issues, the companies said. None of the three organizations said they supported proposed legislation requiring them to disclose who is buying political advertisements on their platforms, although these Web companies promised more public transparency about who is buying ads on their networks.

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The hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee comes as Facebook conceded that as many as 126 million people were exposed to Russian operations on its site during the 2016 presidential election. Facebook said a "troll farm" tied to the Kremlin, called the Internet Research Agency, posted 80,000 times between 2015 and 2017, which resulted in 29 million direct appearances on Facebook news feeds. Thanks to real users liking, sharing, and commenting on these posts, the campaign scored between 87 and 126 million impressions, according to Facebook.

The campaign had real-world consequences. To sow discord, the propaganda sparked a New York street protest over President Donald Trump's victory—prompting between 5,000 to 10,000 protesters to convene on Manhattan's Union Square on November 12.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said the tech sector needs to weed out bad speech and "keep the good."

"This is a national security challenge of the 21st Century," he said.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told the leaders of Facebook, Google, and Twitter that "your power sometimes scares me." Later in the hearing, he added: "I do find your power breathtaking."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the disinformation campaign underscores the "frightening power of social media." She said the Russians "easily and successfully" turned "modern technologies to their advantage."

Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, said (PDF) foreign actors had "abused" the social networking site.

I want to be clear: the foreign interference we saw is reprehensible and outrageous and opened a new battleground for our company, our industry, and our society. That foreign actors, hiding behind fake accounts, abused our platform and other Internet services to try to sow division and discord—and to try to undermine our election process—is an assault on democracy, and it violates all of our values.

Stretch said that, when it came to election propaganda, the disinformation attacked Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton before the election and targeted Donald Trump after he won the election.

"The activity, again, really appears to address a wide range of hot-button topics and appears directed at fomenting discord," Stretch told lawmakers. About an hour later, he described the Russian campaign as a "sophisticated and systemic effort to interfere in the election."

For its part, Google said that a Russian disinformation campaign on YouTube amounted to 1,108 videos, which totaled 43 hours of content. They were published by 18 channels "likely associated" with the Internet Research Agency, Google said.

As Ars noted Monday, those YouTube videos were posted in English with "content that appeared to be political" sandwiched between non-political content like travelogues. The channels in question racked up 309,000 views between June 2016 and November 2016. Google did not disclose YouTube channel or account names associated with this content.

"The videos were not targeted to any particular segment of the US population as that is not a feature available on YouTube, but we did observe that links to those videos were frequently posted to other social media platforms," Richard Salgado, Google's senior counsel, told lawmakers,

According to Twitter, Russian media outlet Russia Today (RT) is estimated to have paid $1.9 million for global advertising to Twitter since it began advertising through the service, including $274,100 in US-targeted advertising in 2016. Days ago, Twitter announced it would block paid advertisement posts by Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik. To illustrate how easily the propaganda could spread, even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey unknowingly retweeted tweets from the Internet Research Agency.

Sean Edgett, Twitter's general counsel, said the company was "committed" to preventing this from happening again. "We are committed to working every single day at solving this problem." He later added, "our tools are getting better every day." Representatives from Google and Facebook made the same promises.

But, again, none of these tech giants would state on the record that their companies supported bipartisan legislation requiring them to disclose who is buying political advertisements on their platforms and maintain records of those ad buys.

"Will you support our bill?" Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked the three representatives.

"We stand ready to work with you and your co-sponsors on that legislation going forward," Facebook's Stretch replied.

"The same goes for Twitter," Edgett added.

Google's Salgado said, "We certainly support the goals of the legislation."

Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat of Minnesota, noted that some of the Russian-backed campaign ads bought on Facebook were paid for in Russian rubles.

"How could you not connect those two dots?" Franken asked Facebook's Stretch.

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David Kravets
The senior editor for Ars Technica. Founder of TYDN fake news site. Technologist. Political scientist. Humorist. Dad of two boys. Been doing journalism for so long I remember manual typewriters with real paper. Emaildavid.kravets@arstechnica.com//Twitter@dmkravets

Directed misinformation campaigns subvert this concept by abusing it. Mandatory disclosure for sponsored messaging is how you help the populace make better-informed decisions, akin to the RDA labels on food, or the already-required disclosure for political TV ads. That kind of legislation doesn't subvert normal free speech, and it has a chance to help inform.

Given those numbers from Facebook, that sounds an awful lot like literally 100% of active US accounts, minus however many use adblock, plus maybe some adblock-enabled users who actively participated in said propaganda theads.

As for money, the inside baseball rumor mill number I've heard going around SV VC money types is more like ~$200mm total across various companies including Cambridge Analytica. That sum of money should would explain why the likes of Google and Facebook put some full-time staff out of the Austin office.

Did facebook explain (or get asked) how their story changed so much in the past 9 months? Going from "what influencing are you talking about" all the way to "126 million accounts impacted" seems like something a company like facebook should have known about. I just can't believe them not knowing then when their entire business is based on that level of detail of influence tracking.

To be honest, I would be fine if there's a ban on all political advertising, from both foreign and domestic sources. Unfortunately there's a lot of money involved and the media stand to lose too much money for this to be a thing.

So, since it is reprehensible Congress is also going to rein in our government doing that by placing restrictions on their budget line items right? I mean if we are saying that it is wrong for other nations to try to influence our elections it is only fair that we don’t do it ourselves so we can’t be called hypocritical.

The US engages in this sort of thing all the time as do China and I'm sure other nations.

US campaign financing is a morass of corrupt actions from all over the globe so what makes this special?

BTW, before the inevitable accusations, I'm not a Russian nor an associated actor - I'm an Australian who finds this Cold War thinking on the behalf of all you Americans totally bizarre. It's been over for thirty years and if you'd done half the things you promised for Russia after it they'd be a staunch ally but instead your governments since then have been playing at empires, badly by all accounts.

You hit a very important point. Russia doesn't even need to buy ads on facebook or pay people to post internet messages. They could just directly donate to various politicians via campaign financing like other foreign political interest groups such as the Zionist lobby. Until this is fixed, the American political system would would still be influenced by powerful special interest groups.

An amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteeing the rights of free expression and action that are fundamental to democratic government. These rights include freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech.

Give it up dude. Nobody hear actually believes in the concept of free speech.

Why should anonymous troll campaigns, designed to damage the United States and undertaken by actors who do not fall within the remit of the 1st Amendment, be treated as protected speech?

Because, in case you haven’t figured out how humans work, if you ‘silence’ speech you don’t agree with (wether the person is right or wrong) it doesn’t help anyone but you and usually actually drives MORE people to look into that speech than otherwise would because obviously you fear something about what they were saying otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to silence them (in their mind). I mean that’s how rebellions, Jihads and the like get started. People telling others ‘see they’re trying to shut us up because they know we’re right and won’t admit it’.

Give it up dude. Nobody hear actually believes in the concept of free speech.

Why should anonymous troll campaigns, designed to damage the United States and undertaken by actors who do not fall within the remit of the 1st Amendment, be treated as protected speech?

Because, in case you haven’t figured out how humans work, if you ‘silence’ speech you don’t agree with (wether the person is right or wrong) it doesn’t help anyone but you and usually actually drives MORE people to look into that speech than otherwise would because obviously you fear something about what they were saying otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to silence them (in their mind). I mean that’s how rebellions, Jihads and the like get started. People telling others ‘see they’re trying to shut us up because they know we’re right and won’t admit it’.

This is insane, though. "If you don't allow anonymous foreign actors to run smear campaigns in order to sow chaos in your country, then people will look into the smear campaign and believe it more. So we have to allow it." What?

Also that argument has nothing to do with the 1st amendment or free speech, which the original post appeared to rely on.

Give it up dude. Nobody hear actually believes in the concept of free speech.

Why should anonymous troll campaigns, designed to damage the United States and undertaken by actors who do not fall within the remit of the 1st Amendment, be treated as protected speech?

Because, in case you haven’t figured out how humans work, if you ‘silence’ speech you don’t agree with (wether the person is right or wrong) it doesn’t help anyone but you and usually actually drives MORE people to look into that speech than otherwise would because obviously you fear something about what they were saying otherwise you wouldn’t be trying to silence them (in their mind). I mean that’s how rebellions, Jihads and the like get started. People telling others ‘see they’re trying to shut us up because they know we’re right and won’t admit it’.

This is insane, though. "If you don't allow anonymous foreign actors to run smear campaigns in order to sow chaos in your country, then people will look into the smear campaign and believe it more. So we have to allow it." What?

Also that argument has nothing to do with the 1st amendment or free speech, which the original post appeared to rely on.

No I didn’t say it has to be allowed and I understood the original post. My point is meeting it with simple ban or removal or whatever doesn’t help it harms. What helps is meeting it head on and pointing out the flaw in their logic. While it may not persuade that person it is a heck of a lot more likely to prevent others from seeking it out and being brain washed by it with no counter, and that is the real goal right? Silencing it just drives it back underground and prevents us from knowing who needs to be watched out for.

An amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteeing the rights of free expression and action that are fundamental to democratic government. These rights include freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech.

An amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteeing the rights of free expression and action that are fundamental to democratic government. These rights include freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech.

The down-votes to your post(s) have nothing to do with Free Speech - you don't have free speech on Arstechnica's forums. You have as much speech as the owner of this site deems you should have, and can silence you permanently at any time.

Now, they may have posted rules and guidelines that will be followed concerning this stuff, but they can change those rules and guidelines any time they like, and these rules are much more restrictive than what you can say on a public street corner or the like.

While I would agree that the voting system here is subpar (why not two votes? One for "I agree/I do not agree" and "user moderation score" which control visibility), other's exercising the limited speech that Ars allows are utilizing that speech to vote you down because they don't agree with you.

Which leads to a second point - you're not safe from most of the consequences of your free speech, and you're not safe from nearly all (or entirely all) on a privately-held forum with specific restrictions you agreed to when you created your account.